Last night, Christian Twitter was alive with the ridiculous and sad clip of Victoria Osteen’s blatant prosperity gospel declaration. “We go to church, not for God, but for us.” I especially liked the enterprising blogger who affixed Bill Cosby’s “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard” to the end of the clip. Well done.
But before we conservatives get too cocky in our outrage, we’d we wise to admit to our own version of the prosperity gospel, a kind of false message that creeps into our gospel proclamation.
None of us are offering people paradise like the Osteens, especially those of us who have travelled to third-world countries and have seen first-hand the crippling poverty experienced by people with faith much greater than our own. Nor would we dare to tell our persecuted brothers and sisters in the Middle East that with just a bit more faith they might be able to...

I want to highlight two recent articles that are related to each other, I think. First, I wrote a column for Christianity.com about the need for comedy. I thought of this in light of the death of Robin Williams. Here's an excerpt:
The Scriptures tell us that laughter is a kind of medicine for the soul (Proverbs 17:22). The very fact that God made us as creatures who have the capacity for laughter, who instilled in us the very desire for joy should tell us that laughter matters and matters more than we might think it does. This is why, I think, the writer of Ecclesiastes, perhaps Solomon, reminded us that there is indeed a time to laugh.
Of course there are darker types of laughter or laughing at things God hates or laughing so as to mock and disrespect someone. Comedy at the expense of someone’s dignity isn’t really comedy at...

I just found out that my close friend and mentor, Bill Swanger, went to be with the Lord this morning at around 6:00 am. It's really hard to put into words how much I loved Bill and how much he helped me in my ministry and in growing as a husband and father.
I met Bill almost by chance. In 2007, I accepted a volunteer position as a youth pastor at Gages Lake Bible Church, a small church in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. The church was in a transition. It's last -full-time pastor had retired a few years earlier and the last interim pastor left to go to the mission field. Bill was a retired pastor who was close friends with one of the key families at GLBC. This was a season of interim pastorates for him and so he agreed to serve.
I really didn't have to get to know...

Unless you've been living under a rock, you have undoubtedly had your Facebook timeline inundated with friends, family, and celebrities doing the #icebucketchallenge. Everyone from people you don't know to Mitt Romney (in a suit!), former President George W. Bush, and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell have dumped large buckets of water on their head to raise awareness and support to fight ALS. I recommend a short article by my ERLC colleagues Andrew Walker and Joe Carter to help you discern where to allocate funding for ALS research.
But I want to think through what helpful things we can learn about why this successful viral campaign worked.
1) It was easy to understand and easy to execute. Very simple. Take a bucket of water and pour it over your head (or have someone pour it over your head), record it, post it, and tag someone else who has 24 hours to do the same thing. It's easy...